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Update #1: Laurence Hartje, having gone through this process, set the record straight down in the comments. Things aren’t as bad as originally thought.
Microsoft’s Xbox DRM will lock you out of your own content if you get your red-ringed Xbox replaced.
I bolded that sentence, to give you something to chew on.
If you got your Xbox and started renting movies, buying music and downloading arcade games, consider this awesome little tid-bit of information: The DRM on the Xbox locks the content to the serial ID of that console. If your Xbox red-rings on you (like they all do) and you get it replaced, it will be a different Xbox, and your content will no longer be fully functional.
Some of you may have never considered this most rudimentary problem because it just seems too stupid to be real… but it is.
The Consumerist covered a story from a reader that took 4 months to finally get a “Sorry, fuck off” reply from Microsoft about getting access to his DRM’ed content after getting his Xbox replaced.
Microsoft’s message to gamers: You retards will buy our stuff anyway, so just shut up and buy it again.
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February 12th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
yea thanks my friends with xboxes are chewing hard on this lol
February 13th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
I’m anti-DRM, but this is FUD and incorrect.
As a person who has replaced his 360, I’ve lost NO CONTENT. Here’s how it works. If you purchase something through Live! it is authenticated to your 360’s hardware id (at time of purchase), and your Live! account id. One of those has to match for the item to work.
If you have your 360 replaced, then the hardware ids do not match. So you must be signed into Live! to play the content you’ve purchased on the original console (this is how I have to play Live! arcade games that I purchased on my original console). Any new purchases work when you are signed out of Live!, since the hardware ids match.
The only time you are screwed is when: a) you’ve bought rental content that expired while the machine was RRoDed. Who knows what MS’s policy is for refunds in this case.
b) You loose access to the original Live! account when you get your new box (can’t remember password, no e-mail access for account password reset).
My original 360 died, and I replaced it with an Elite. I can play every title that I purchased on my original console.
I think the incident must be a strange special case, as all the people I know who have replaced 360s still have access to original content. Of course, MS should have a way of fixing this (they “protected” the content, therefore they should have a policy and system in place for when this protection fails — and telling the customer that they are screwed is NOT acceptable (although not surprising for MS)
February 13th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Laurence, thanks for setting the record straight… I’ve updated the top of the post to point to your comment incase anyone runs across it.
February 21st, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Laurence, here’s where everyone’s having the problem though…
Multiple people might use one xbox, therefore there are multiple accounts. So if content I downloaded is only accessible to my account, that makes for less fun for all the other people who might use my xbox.
Say for instance my friends all come over and bring their accounts with them on their memory cards. We take turns playing halo 3 on xbox live. I’ve paid for and downloaded the new map pack on my account. But since I did that before I got the RROD, if it’s not my turn to be one of the 4 people playing… then everyone else isn’t going to be playing the newer maps. Same thing goes for something like Guitar Hero III or any other game with downloaded content.
It’s not that big of a deal for content like movies and what not… more of an inconvience… But for games where your stats are kept up with… if I don’t want people playing on my account, then are they just stuck with playing without the added content…
That’s unacceptable.
Being a software engineer… I understand why they implemented this protection, to prevent piracy and copying and content and all that jazz… bla bla… However in their testing, they obviously didn’t take into consideration what would happen if the hardware’s ID did legitimately need to be changed.
I believe there should have obviously been some sort of process in place to transfer over or recode the DRM for content to a new system ID. I understand it’s pretty difficult to implement a system allowing only microsoft to change the hardware ID on DRM. Probably actually impossible, but I won’t delve into the realm of computer security here. Of course they weren’t counting on such a monumental hardware failure rate, that would only lead to a blatantly obvious software failure as well
I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft could pull this off with an updated DRM standard… only problem is all the old content might not be compatible with the new feature and they would have to authorize the redownload of tons and tons of content. Figuring all of that out and keeping track of it would likely cost millions.
But it’s their fault for screwing this up… It’s time they fix it. Just b/c we’re all sheep and keep buying their products doesn’t mean they can just give us the middle finger and not fix their buggy everything.